leg pulling : Java Glossary

A popular Canadian form of humour where you pretend to describe something seriously,
and gradually get more ridiculous, seeing how long you can suck people in before they
notice. If you are serious about describing a future technology and you notice your
audience is feeling threatened, it is fairly easy to relax them by quickly veering
off into an obvious leg pull. This way you can let them get used to new ideas first
in the context of humour. You can also use it for gently rebuking people.

The advantage of leg pulling to rebuke someone is they don’t know if you are
serious. Are you praising them, laughing at them, criticising them, just drunk? They
have to think, which was the original intent, to sneak past their
psychological defenses against thinking about their effects on others.

I discovered at talent night at the UN (United Nations)
club at UBC (University of British Columbia) that humour is quite national. Only people from the
joke teller’s country could understand the national flavour of humour. Pros can
have a more international appeal.

Canadians drive Americans nuts with our enjoyment of camouflaging humourous
intent. Part of the enjoyment is similar to solving a puzzle and the one upmanship
of knowing you were one of the in people who noticed and understood the joke.

In Canadian humour, you often intentionally pretend to ignore sarcasm, especially
when you are not quite sure. With so many points of view flying at you in a
newsgroup, it is hard to keep track who has which prejudices. You usually need the
verbal and body language clues to pick it up. BIX, a forerunner to the Internet newsgroups, had picons you could use to label or categorise people to help keep
track. There was a central database of icons supplied by posters, mostly photos or
personal or corporate logos, but sometimes just strange images.

In a similar vein, Canadians may pretend not to notice insults and pretend to
take the abuser literally, as if the insults were intended as serious questions or
objections. This can be used to talk down to the abuser as if he were a small child
who needed very basic facts patiently explained.

Canadians tend not to be as explicit with humour. Smileys and laugh tracks are an
anathema. A good joke should go over the heads of 10-90% of the
audience. Part the pleasure of Canadian humor is the one upmanship of being the only
guy in the room who gets a joke, or who gets it 5 seconds sooner.

you could drive Canadians wild by just laughing at a random point in
somebody’s speech or a movie. Everyone else goes crazy trying to figure out the
joke.

I once went to a United Nations talent show. Amateurs from different countries
would get up and tell funny stories and jokes. The people from their country would be
screaming in laughter. Everyone else sat in stunned baffled silence. Humour tends to
be nationally idiosyncratic.